Global Geographies : Towards a regional system in the Middle East – SYSREMO

The research project SYSREMO (Global Geographies: Towards a regional system in the Middle East) is based on the hypothesis that economic and social transnational processes are reshaping the Middle East. These transnational networks and flows are increasing in number, diversity, and importance. They can be observed in the growth and diversification of trade flows and Foreign Direct Investments; in the complexification of vertical integration in industrial networks; in the increase and diversification of the mobility of people (forced mobilities, tourism, pilgrimages and temporary to permanent work migrations); or in the increase of the circulation and diffusion of new goods, cultural products and ideas. All these elements lead to the assumption that elements of a regional system, partially centred on the Persian Gulf countries, is emerging. This assumption contradicts the more common picture of a region characterized mainly by its conflicts, hard borders and extraversion.
The research project therefore offers a reformulation of the spatial organisation and economic and social categories in the Middle East, in using analytical approaches based on theories of globalisation and theories of spatial systems. It aims at analyzing the fact in which the societies in the Middle East are as much as in other regions of the world reshaped by their insertion in the globalization process.